Oh, The Games Dwindle Down To A Precious Few

January 03, 1986|By Ron Grossman.

For Chicagoans, Jan. 27 promises to be the ultimate day after.

Even now, the Psychoanalytic Institute ought to be positioning its shrink shock troops to deal with football-withdrawal syndrome on an epidemic scale. While the Bears are just beginning their playoff schedule that will--repeat WILL--take them to the Super Bowl on Jan. 26, football has begun its January Song. The college bowls are over, and the games dwindle down to a precious few.

But what a precious few. Civic-minded individuals interested in serving as para-professionals during the public health emergency of the next few weekends should be be alert to the following symptoms: After five months of staring at TV images of fleet-footed running backs and sure-handed wide receivers, many Chicagoans will have been as firmly conditioned as Pavlov`s dogs ever were. So some will still pass every seventh day frantically twisting the boob tube`s knobs in search of one last Bears game.

Indeed, this almost-concluded pigskin season has rearranged our city`s psychic self-image like no other experience before it. Over the past four months, the Monsters of the Midway have transformed Chicago from being a home for perennial also-rans into, as Carl Sandburg said, ``the city of the broad shoulder pads.`` Well, at least the poet would have put it that way had he lived to see the modern miracle of a 15 and 1 season.

Now comes the tough part: Having just now come to grips with our new role as winners, we have to find the way to adjust our lives for the duration of the post-football months of the forthcoming year. Two such civic lobotomies in succession would test the mettle of any metropolis.

Frank Diaz, promotions manager of the Ultimate Sports Bar and Grill, thinks that a change of scenery is the only way to get fans through their post-football season depression. So right after the Super Bowl, he will load a group of his patrons on a bus and take them up to Michigan in the hopes that a skiing expedition can ease the yuppie-fan set through its withdrawl convulsions.

For many Chicago merchants, the football season already has given new meaning to the concept of Sunday as a day of rest. Scott Baskin, president of the Mark Shale haberdashery chain, says that the instant the Bears took the field his stores emptied out with a weekly regularity that you could set your watch by.

Jack Drexler, who presides over the steam tables at Fluky`s, reports a similar pattern. Just before game time, you could hardly squeeze into his Far North Side hot dog emporium. Those same hungry crowds would return at halftime but for the rest of Bears` Sundays his countermen just stood around and stared at the four walls.

At Rosenthal Furs, they are concerned that the same chronographic phenomenon might last into the new year. Traditionally, the Michigan Avenue boutique schedules its post-season clearance sale for the first Sunday in January. This year, though, the Bears have a post-season of their own, and will be hosting a playoff game that day. So Rosenthal has moved its sale`s starting time to Saturday in the hopes of attracting fat-cat fur buyers before the antics at Soldier Field monopolize their attention and pocketbooks. For Sunday, the store will move to a if-you-can`t-beat-them-join-them strategy. TV sets will be installed in the salon so that fur-minded football fans can swing their eyes, table-tennis style, between the game and the shop`s mink-and-ermine-draped mannequins. That parley of sex and violence ought to make Rosenthal`s sale a check-rated best buy.

Joliet`s Rialto Square Theatre is similarly cautious about bucking the current wave of football mania. By previous arrangement, ballet mistress Ruth Page will mount a production of ``Die Fledermaus`` there the weekend of Jan. 25-26. For Super Bowl Sunday`s version, the ballet`s starting time has been moved up to 2 p.m. That way, dance-and-touchdown aficionados should be able to get home to their TVs just in time to make the day a high-and-low-culture double-header.

Among other local impresarios who have adjusted their offerings to the realities of the season are Bob Djahanguiri, proprietor of a series of romance-minded North Side restaurants. Traditionally, his Yvette restaurant hosts a series of Sunday afternoon jazz concerts from the first of the year on. This time, though, the place won`t echo with flatted-fifths and blues chords until February when football`s swan song will at long last be sung.

The long-running musical ``Cats`` represents another entertainment species that fears to go one-on-one with the Bears. This fall and winter, T. S. Eliot`s feline celebration has been playing at the Shubert on a never-on-Sunday basis. Once the Super Bowl is history, though, the cast will start to take Mondays off, in favor of a new series of post-pigskin-season Sunday matinees.

Shaw`s Crab House, the Near North Side seafood restaurant, similarly postponed its pre-planned Sunday opening until after the Super Bowl.